CHAPTER XVIII. GREEK DIVINE MYTHS

Gods in myth, and God in religion--The society of the gods

like that of men in Homer--Borrowed elements in Greek

belief--Zeus--His name--Development of his legend--His

bestial shapes explained--Zeus in religion--Apollo--Artemis--

Dionysus--Athene--Aphrodite--Hermes--Demeter--Their names,

natures, rituals and legends--Conclusions.

In the gods of Greece, when represented in ideal art and in the best

religious sentiment, as revealed by poets and philosophers, from Homer

to Plato, from Plato to Porphyry, there is something truly human and

truly divine. It cannot be doubted that the religion of Apollo, Athene,

Artemis and Hermes was, in many respects, an adoration directed to the

moral and physical qualities that are best and noblest. Again, even in

the oldest Greek literature, in Homer and in all that follows, the name

of the chief god, Zeus, might in many places be translated by our word

"God".*

* _Postea_, "Zeus".

It is God that takes from man half his virtue on the day of slavery; it

is God that gives to each his lot in life, and ensures that as his

day is so shall his strength be. This spiritual conception of deity,

undifferentiated by shape or attributes, or even by name, declares

itself in the Homeric terms (------------) and in the (------) of

Herodotus. These are spiritual forces or tendencies ruling the world,

and these conceptions are present to the mind, even of Homer, whose

pictures of the gods are so essentially anthropomorphic; even of

Herodotus, in all things so cautiously reverent in his acceptation of

the popular creeds and rituals. When Socrates, therefore, was doomed

to death for his theories of religion, he was not condemned so much

for holding a pure belief in a spiritual divinity, as for bringing that

opinion (itself no new thing) into the marketplace, and thereby shocking

the popular religion, on which depended the rites that were believed to

preserve the fortune of the state.

It is difficult or impossible quite to unravel the tangled threads of

mythical legend, of sacerdotal ritual, of local religion, and of refined

religious sentiment in Greece. Even in the earliest documents, the

Homeric poems, religious sentiment deserts, in moments of deep and

serious thought, the brilliant assembly of the Olympians, and takes

refuge in that fatherhood of the divine "after which all men yearn".*

* _Odyssey_, iii. 48.

Yet, even in Pausanias, in the second century of the Christian era, and

still more in Plutarch and Porphyry, there remains an awful acquiescence

in such wild dogmas and sacred traditions as antiquity handed down. We

can hardly determine whether even Homer actually believed in his own

turbulent cowardly Ares, in his own amorous and capricious Zeus. Did

Homer, did any educated Greek, turn in his thoughts, when pain, or

sorrow, or fear fell on him, to a hope in the help of Hermes or Athene?

He was ready to perform all their rites and offer all the sacrifices

due, but it may be questioned whether, even in such a god-fearing man

as Nicias, this ritualism meant more than a desire to "fulfil all

righteousness," and to gratify a religious sentiment in the old

traditional forms.

In examining Greek myths, then, it must be remembered that, like all

myths, they have far less concern with religion in its true guise--with

the yearning after the divine which "is not far from any one of us,"

after the God "in whom we live, and move, and have our being"--than with

the _religio_, which is a tissue of old barbarous fears, misgivings,

misapprehensions. The religion which retained most of the myths was that

ancient superstition which is afraid of "changing the luck," and which,

therefore, keeps up acts of ritual that have lost their significance

in their passage from a dark and dateless past. It was the local

priesthoods of demes and remote rural places that maintained the old

usages of the ancient tribes and kindreds--usages out of keeping with

the mental condition of the splendid city state, or with the national

sentiment of Hellenism. But many of the old tales connected with, and

explanatory of, these ritual practices, after "winning their way to the

mythical," as Thucydides says, won their way into literature, and meet

us in the odes of Pindar, the plays of AEschylus and Sophocles, the notes

of commentators, and the apologetic efforts of Plutarch and Porphyry.

It is with these antique stories that the mythologist is concerned. But

even here he need not loose his reverence for the nobler aspects of the

gods of Greece. Like the archaeologist and excavator, he must touch with

careful hand these--

Strange clouded fragments of the ancient glory,

Late lingerers of the company divine;

For even in ruin of their marble limbs

They breathe of that far world wherefrom they came,

Of liquid light and harmonies serene,

Lost halls of heaven and far Olympian air.*

"Homer and Hesiod named the gods for the Greeks;" so Herodotus thought,

and constructed the divine genealogies. Though the gods were infinitely

older than Homer, though a few of them probably date from before the

separation of the Indo-Aryan and Hellenic stocks, it is certain that

Homer and Hesiod stereotyped, to some extent, the opinions about the

deities which were current in their time.**

* Ernest Myers, Hermes, in _The Judgment of Prometheus_.

** As a proof of the Pre-Homeric antiquity of Zeus, it has

often been noticed that Homer makes Achilles pray to Zeus of

Dodona (the Zeus, according to Thrasybulus, who aided

Deucalion after the deluge) as the "Pelasgian" Zeus (Iliad,

xvi. 233). "Pelasgian" may be regarded as equivalent to "

pre-historic Greek ". Sophocles (Trach., 65; see Scholiast)

still speaks of the Selli, the priests of Dodonean Zeus, as

"mountain-dwelling and couching on the earth ". They

retained, it seems, very primitive habits. Be it observed

that Achilles has been praying for confusion and ruin to the

Achaeans, and so invokes the deity of an older, perhaps

hostile, race. Probably the oak-oracle at Dodona, the

message given by "the sound of a going in the tree-tops" or

by the doves, was even more ancient than Zeus, who, on that

theory, fell heir to the rites of a peasant oracle connected

with tree-worship. Zeus, according to Hesiod, "dwelt in the

trunk of the oak tree" (cited by Preller, i. 98), much as an

Indian forest-god dwells in the peepul or any other tree. It

is rather curious that, according to Eustathius (_Iliad_,

xvi. 233), "Pelargicus," "connected with storks," was

sometimes written for Pelasgicus; that there was a Dodona in

Thessaly, and that storks were sacred to the Thessalians.

Hesiod codified certain priestly and Delphian theories about their

origin and genealogies. Homer minutely described their politics and

society. His description, however, must inevitably have tended to

develop a later scepticism. While men lived in city states under heroic

kings, acknowledging more or less the common sway of one king at Argos

or Mycenae, it was natural that the gods (whether in the dark backward of

time Greece knew a Moral Creative Being or not) should be conceived as

dwelling in a similar society, with Zeus for their Agamemnon, a ruler

supreme but not absolute, not safe from attempts at resistance and

rebellion. But when Greek politics and society developed into a crowd of

republics, with nothing answering to a certain imperial sway, then men

must have perceived that the old divine order was a mere survival from

the time when human society was similarly ordained. Thus Xenophanes very

early proclaimed that men had made the gods in their own likeness, as

a horse, could he draw, would design his deity in equine semblance. But

the detection by Xenophanes of the anthropomorphic tendency in religion

could not account for the instinct which made Greeks, like other

peoples, as Aristotle noticed, figure their gods not only in human

shape, but in the guise of the lower animals. For that zoomorphic

element in myth an explanation, as before, will be sought in the early

mental condition which takes no great distinction between man and

the beasts. The same method will explain, in many cases, the other

peculiarly un-Hellenic elements in Greek divine myth. Yet here, too,

allowance must be made for the actual borrowing of rites and legends

from contiguous peoples.

The Greeks were an assimilative race. The alphabet of their art they

obtained, as they obtained their written alphabet, from the kingdoms of

the East.* Like the Romans, they readily recognised their own gods, even

under the barbarous and brutal disguises of Egyptian popular religion;

and, while recognising their god under an alien shape, they may have

taken over legends alien to their own national character.** Again,

we must allow, as in India, for myths which are really late, the

inventions, perhaps, of priests or oracle-mongers. But in making these

deductions, we must remember that the later myths would be moulded, in

many cases, on the ancient models. These ancient models, there is reason

to suppose, were often themselves of the irrational and savage character

which has so frequently been illustrated from the traditions of the

lower races.

The elder dynasties of Greek gods, Uranus and Cronos, with their

adventures and their fall, have already been examined.***

* Helbig, _Homerwche Epos cms dem Denhmalern_. Perrot and

Chipiez, on Mycenaean art, represent a later view.

** On the probable amount of borrowing in Greek religion see

Maury, Religions de la Greece, iii. 70-75; Newton, Nineteenth

Century, 1878, p. 306. Gruppe, Griech. Culte u. Mythen.,

pp. 153-163

*** "Greek Cosmogonic Myths," antea.

Uranus may have been an ancient sky-god, like the Samoyed Num, deposed

by Cronus, originally, perhaps, one of the deputy-gods, active where

their chief is otiose, whom we find in barbaric theology. But this is

mere guess-work. We may now turn to the deity who was the acknowledged

sovereign of the Greek Olympus during all the classical period from the

date of Homer and Hesiod to the establishment of Christianity. We have

to consider the legend of Zeus.

It is necessary first to remind the reader that all the legends in the

epic poems date after the time when an official and national Olympus

had been arranged. Probably many tribal gods, who had originally no

connection with gods of other tribes, had, by Homer's age, thus accepted

places and relationships in the Olympic family. Even rude low-born

Pelasgian deities may have been adopted into the highest circles, and

fitted out with a divine pedigree in perfect order.

To return to Zeus, his birth (whether as the eldest or the youngest of

the children of Cronus) has already been studied; now we have to deal

with his exploits and his character.

About the meaning of the name of Zeus the philologists seem more than

commonly harmonious. They regard the Greek Zeus as the equivalent of the

Sanskrit Dyaus, "the bright one," a term for the sky.*

* Max Mueller, _Selected Essays_, ii. 419; Preller, Gr.

Myth., i. 92.

He was especially worshipped on hill-tops (like the Aztec rain-god); for

example, on Ithome, Parnes, Cithgeron, and the Lycaean hill of Arcadia.

On the Arcadian mountain, a centre of the strangest and oldest rites,

the priest of Zeus acted as what the African races call a "rainmaker".

There was on the hill the sacred well of the nymph Hagno, one of the

nurses of the child Zeus. In time of drought the priest of Zeus offered

sacrifice and prayer to the water according to ritual law, and it would

be interesting to know what it was that he sacrificed. He then gently

stirred the well with a bough from the oak, the holy tree of the god,

and when the water was stirred, a cloud arose like mist, which attracted

other clouds and caused rain. As the priest on a mountain practically

occupied a meteorological observatory, he probably did not perform

these rites till he knew that a "depression" might be expected from one

quarter or another.*

* See similar examples of popular magic in Gervase of

Tilbury, Otia Imperiidia; Liebrecht, ii. 146. The citation

is due to Freller, i. 102.

Wonderful feats of rain-prophecy are done by Australian seers, according

to Mrs. Langloh Parker and others. As soon as we meet Zeus in Homer, we

find that he is looked on, not as the sky, but as the deity who "dwells

in the heights of air," and who exercises supreme sway over all things,

including storm and wind and cloud. He casts the lightning forth

(--------) he thunders on high (--------), he has dark clouds for his

covering (--------) all these imposing aspects he is _religiously_

regarded by people who approach him in prayer. These aspects would

be readily explained by the theory that Zeus, after having been the

personal sky, came to be thought a powerful being who dwelt in the

sky, if we did not find such beings worshipped where the sky is not yet

adored, as in Australia. Much the same occurred if, as M. Maspero points

out, in Egypt the animals were worshipped first, and then later the gods

supposed to be present in the animals. So the sky, a personal sky, was

first adored, later a god dwelling in the sky. But it is less easy

to show how this important change in opinion took place, if it really

occurred. A philological theory of the causes which produced the change

is set forth by Mr. Keary in his book _Primitive Belief_. In his opinion

the sky was first worshipped as a vast non-personal phenomenon, "the

bright thing"(_Dyaus_). But, to adopt the language of Mr. Max Mueller,

who appears to hold the same views, "Dyaus ceased to be an expressive

predicate; it became a traditional name";* it "lost its radical

meaning". Thus where a man had originally said, "It thunders," or rather

"He thunders," he came to say, "Dyaus" (that is, the sky) "thunders".

* Select Essays, ii. 419.

Next Dyaus, or rather the Greek form Zeus, almost lost its meaning of

the sky, and the true sense being partially obscured, became a name

supposed to indicate a person. Lastly the expression became "Zeus

thunders," Zeus being regarded as a person, because the old meaning of

his name, "the sky," was forgotten, or almost forgotten. The _nomen_

(name) has become a _numen_ (god). As Mr. Keary puts it, "The god stands

out as clear and thinkable in virtue of this name as any living friend

can be". The whole doctrine resolves itself into this, a phenomenon

originally (according to the theory) considered impersonal, came to be

looked on as personal, because a word survived in colloquial expressions

after it had lost, or all but lost, its original meaning. As a result,

'all the changes and processes of the impersonal sky came to be spoken

of as personal actions performed by a personal being, Zeus. The record

of these atmospheric processes on this theory is the legend of Zeus.

Whatever is irrational and abominable in the conduct of the god is

explained as originally a simple statement of meteorological phenomena.

"Zeus weds his mother;" that must mean the rain descends on the earth,

from which it previously arose in vapour. "Zeus weds his daughter," that

is, the rain falls on the crop, which grew up from the rainy embrace of

sky and earth.

Here then we have the philological theory of the personality and conduct

of Zeus. To ourselves and those who have followed us the system will

appear to reverse the known conditions of the working of the human

mind among early peoples. On the philological theory, man first

regards phenomena in our modern way as impersonal; he then gives them

personality as the result of a disease of language, of a forgetfulness

of the sense of words. Thus Mr. Keary writes: "The idea of personality

as apart from matter must have been growing more distinct when men could

attribute personality to such an abstract phenomenon as the sky ". Where

is the distinctness in a conception which produces such confusion? We

have seen that as the idea of personality becomes more distinct the

range of its application becomes narrower, not wider. The savage, it has

been thought, attributes personality to everything without exception. As

the idea of personality grows more distinct it necessarily becomes less

extensive, till we withdraw it from all but intelligent human beings.

Thus we must look for some other explanation of the personality of

Zeus, supposing his name to mean the sky. This explanation we find in a

survival of the savage mental habit of regarding all phenomena, even the

most abstract, as persons. Our theory will receive confirmation from

the character of the personality of Zeus in his myth. Not only is he

a person, but in myth, as distinct from religion, he is a very savage

person, with all the powers of the medicine-man and all the passions of

the barbarian. Why should this be so on the philological theory? When

we examine the legend of Zeus, we shall see which explanation best meets

the difficulties of the problem. But the reader must again be reminded

that the Zeus of myth, in Homer and elsewhere, is a very different being

from the Zeus of religion of Achilles's prayer, from the Zeus whom the

Athenians implored to rain on their fields, and from the Zeus who was

the supreme being of the tragedians, of the philosophers, and of later

Greece.

The early career, _la jeunesse orageuse_, of Zeus has been studied

already. The child of Cronus and Rhea, countless places asserted their

claim to be the scene of his birth, though the Cretan claim was most

popular.*

* Hesiod, _Theog_., 468; Paus., iv. 33, 2.

In Crete too was the grave of Zeus: a scandal to pious heathendom. The

euhemerists made this tomb a proof that Zeus was a deified man. Preller

takes it for an allegory of winter and the death of the god of storm,

who in winter is especially active. Zeus narrowly escaped being

swallowed by his father, and, after expelling and mediatising that

deity, he changed his own wife, Metis, into a fly, swallowed her, and

was delivered out of his own head of Athene, of whom his wife had been

pregnant. He now became ruler of the world, with his brother Poseidon

for viceroy, so to speak, of the waters, and his brother Hades for lord

of the world of the dead. Like the earlier years of Louis XIV., the

earlier centuries of the existence of Zeus were given up to a series of

amours, by which he, like Charles II., became the father of many noble

families. His legitimate wife was his sister Hera, whom he seduced

before wedlock "without the knowledge of their dear parents," says

Homer,* who neglects the myth that one of the "dear parents" ate his

own progeny, "like him who makes his generation messes to gorge his

appetite". Hera was a jealous wife, and with good cause.** The Christian

fathers calculated that he sowed his wild oats and persecuted mortal

women with his affections through seventeen generations of men. His

amours with his mother and daughters, with Deo and Persephone, are the

great scandals of Clemens Alexandrinus and Arnobius.*** Zeus seldom made

love _in propria persona_, in all his meteorological pomp. When he thus

gratified Semele she was burned to a cinder.****

* It is probable that this myth of the seduction of Hera is

of Samian origin, and was circulated to account for and

justify the Samian custom by which men seduced their loves

first and celebrated the marriage afterwards (Scholia on

_Iliad_, xiv. 201). "Others say that Samos was the place

where Zeus betrayed Hera, whence it comes that the Samians,

when they go a-wooing, anticipate the wedding first in

secret, and then celebrate it openly." Yet another myth

(_Iliad_, xiv. 295, Scholiast) accounts for the hatred which

Zeus displayed to Prometheus by the fable that, before her

wedding with Zeus, Hera became the mother of Prometheus by

the giant Eurymedon. Euphorion was the authority for this

tale. Yet another version occurs in the legend of

Hephaestus. See also Schol., _Theoc_., xv. 64.

** Iliad, xiv. 307, 340.

*** Arnobius, Adv. Nat., v. 9, where the abominations

described defy repetition. The myth of a rock which became

the mother of the offspring of Zeus may recall the maternal

flint of Aztec legend and the vagaries of Iroquois

tradition. Compare _Clemens Alex_., Oxford, 1719, i. 13, for

the amours of Zeus, Deo and Persephone, with their

representations in the mysteries; also Arnob., Adv. Cent.,

v. 20. Zeus adopted the shape of a serpent in his amour with

his daughter. An ancient Tarentine sacred ditty is quoted as

evidence, _Taurus draconem genuit, et taurum draco_, and

certain repulsive performances with serpents in the

mysteries are additional testimony.

**** Apollodorus, iii. 4, 3.

The amour with Danae, when Zeus became a shower of gold, might be

interpreted as a myth of the yellow sunshine. The amours of Zeus under

the disguise of various animal forms were much more usual, and are

familiar to all.* As Cronus when in love metamorphosed himself into

a stallion, as Prajapati pursued his own daughter in the shape of a

roebuck, so Zeus became a serpent, a bull, a swan, an eagle, a dove,**

and, to woo the daughter of Cletor, an ant. Similar disguises are

adopted by the sorcerers among the Algonkins for similar purposes. When

Pund-jel, in the Australian myth of the Pleiades, was in love with a

native girl, he changed himself into one of those grubs in the bark of

trees which the Blacks think edible, and succeeded as well as Zeus did

when he became an ant.***

* The mythologists, as a rule, like the heathen opponents of

Arnobius, Clemens and Eusebius, explain the amours of Zeus

as allegories of the fruitful union of heaven and earth, of

rain and grain. Preller also allows for the effects of human

vanity, noble families insisting on tracing themselves to

gods. On the whole, says Preller, "Zeugung in der Natur-

religion und Mythologie, dasselbe ist was Schopfung inden

deistischen Religionen" (i. 110). Doubtless all these

elements come into the legend; the unions of Zeus with Deo

and Persephone especially have much the air of a nature-myth

told in an exceedingly primitive and repulsive manner. The

amours in animal shape are explained in the text as in many

cases survivals of the totemistic belief in descent from

beasts, sans phrase.

**Lian., Hist Vwr., i. 15.

*** Dawson, Australian Aborigines; Custom, and Myth, p. 126.

It is not improbable that the metamorphosis of Zeus into an ant is the

result of a _volks-etymologie_ which derived "Myrmidons" from (------),

an ant. Even in that case the conversion of the ant into an avatar of

Zeus would be an example of the process of gravitation or attraction,

whereby a great mythical name and personality attracts to itself

floating fables.* The remark of Clemens on this last extraordinary

intrigue is suggestive. The Thessalians, he says, are reputed to worship

ants because Zeus took the semblance of an ant when he made the daughter

of Cletor mother of Myrmidon. Where people worship any animal from whom

they claim descent (in this case through Myrmidon, the ancestor of the

famed Myrmidons), we have an example of stiraight forward totemism. To

account for the adoration of the animal on the hypothesis that it was

the incarnation of a god, is the device which has been observed in

Egyptian as in Samoan religion, and in that of aboriginal Indian

tribes, whose animal gods become saints "when the Brahmans get a turn at

them".**

The most natural way of explaining such tales about the amours and

animal metamorphoses of so great a god, is to suggest that Zeus

inherited,*** as it were, legends of a lower character long current

among separate families and in different localities. In the same way,

where a stone had been worshipped, the stone was, in at least one

instance, dubbed with the name of Zeus.****

* Clemens, p. 84.

** See Mr. H. H. Risley on "Primitive Marriage in Bengal,"

in _Astatic Quarterly Review_, June, 1886.

*** In Pausanias's opinion Cecrops first introduced the

belief in Zeus, the most highest.

**** Paus., iii. 21, l; but the reading is doubtful.

The tradition of descent from this or that beast or plant has been shown

to be most widely prevalent. On the general establishment of a higher

faith in a national deity, these traditions, it is presumed, would not

wholly disappear, but would be absorbed into the local legend of the

god. The various beasts would become sacred to him, as the sheep was

sacred to Hera in Samos, according to Mandrobulus,* and images of the

animals would congregate in his temple. The amours of Zeus, then, are

probably traceable to the common habit of deriving noble descents from a

god, and in the genealogical narrative older totemistic and other local

myths found a place.** Apart from his intrigues, the youth of Zeus was

like that of some masquerading and wandering king, such as James V. in

Scotland. Though Plato, in the _Republic_, is unwilling that the young

should be taught how the gods go about disguised as strangers, this was

their conduct in the myths. Thus we read of

Lycaon and his fifty sons, whom Zeus

In their own house spied on, and unawares

Watching at hand, from his disguise arose,

And overset the table where they sat

Around their impious feast, and slew them all.***

Clemens of Alexandria**** contrasts the "human festival" of Zeus among

the Ethiopians with the inhuman banquet offered to him by Lycaon in

Arcadia.*****

* Op. Clem. Alex., i. 36.

** Compare Heyne, Observ. in Apollodor., i. 8, 1.

*** Bridges, _Prometheus the Firegiver_.

**** Clem. Alex., L 31.

***** Paus., viii. 2, l.

The permanence of Arcadian human sacrifice has already been alluded to,

and it is confirmed by the superstition that whoever tasted the human

portion in the mess sacrificed to Zeus became a were-wolf, resuming his

original shape if for ten years he abstained from the flesh of men.*

A very quaint story of the domestic troubles of Zeus was current in

Plataea, where it was related at the festival named _Daedala_. It was

said that Hera, indignant at the amours of her lord, retired to Euboae.

Zeus, wishing to be reconciled to her, sought the advice of Cithaeron,

at that time king of Plataea. By his counsel the god celebrated a sham

marriage with a wooden image, dressed up to personate Plataea, daughter

of Asopus. Hera flew to the scene and tore the bridal veil, when,

discovering the trick, she laughed, and was reconciled to her husband.**

Probably this legend was told to explain some incident of ritual or

custom in the feast of the Daedala, and it is certainly a more innocent

myth than most that were commemorated in local mystery-plays.

* The wolves connected with the worship of Zeus, like his

rams, goats, and other animals, are commonly explained as

mythical names for elemental phenomena, clouds and storms.

Thus the ram's fleece, (--------), used in certain expiatory

rites (Hesych., s. v., Lobeck, p. 183), is presumed by

Preller to be a symbol of the cloud. In the same way his

regis or goat-skin is the storm-wind or the thunder-cloud.

The opposite view will be found in Professor Robertson

Smith's article on "Sacrifice" in _Encyc. Brit_., where the

similar totemistic rites of the lower races are adduced. The

elemental theory is set forth by Decharme, _Mythologie de la

Grece Antique_ (Paris, 1879), p. 16. For the "storm-wolf,"

see Preller, i. 101. It seems a little curious that the

wolf, which, on the solar hypothesis, was a brilliant beast

connected with the worship of the sun-god, Apollo Lycaeus,

becomes a cloud or storm-wolf when connected with Zeus. On

the whole subject of the use of the skins of animals as

clothing of the god or the ministrant, see Lobeck,

_Aglaoph_., pp. 188-186, and Robertson Smith, op. cit.

** Paus., ix. 3, 1.

It was not only when he was _en bonne fortune_ that Zeus adopted the

guise of a bird or beast. In the very ancient temple of Hera near

Mycenae there was a great statue of the goddess, of gold and ivory, the

work of Polycletus, and therefore comparatively modern. In one hand the

goddess held a pomegranate, in the other a sceptre, on which was perched

a cuckoo, like the Latin woodpecker Picus on his wooden post. About the

pomegranate there was a myth which Pausanias declines to tell, but he

does record the myth of the cuckoo. "They say that when Zeus loved the

yet virgin Hera, he changed himself into a cuckoo, which she pursued

and caught to be her playmate." Pausanias admits that he did not believe

this legend. Probably it was invented to account for the companionship

of the cuckoo, which, like the cow, was one of the sacred animals of

Hera. Myths of this class are probably later than the period in which we

presume the divine relationships of gods and animals to have passed out

of the totemistic into the Samoan condition of belief. The more general

explanation is, that the cuckoo, as a symbol of the vernal season,

represents the heaven in its wooing of the earth. On the whole, as we

have tried to show, the symbolic element in myth is late, and was meant

to be explanatory of rites and usages whose original significance was

forgotten. It would be unfair to assume that a god was disrespectfully

viewed by his earliest worshippers because aetiological, genealogical,

and other myths, crystallised into his legend.

An extremely wild legend of Zeus was current among the Galatae, where

Pausanias expressly calls it a "local myth," differing from the Lydian

variant. Zeus in his sleep became, by the earth, father of Attes, Va

being both male and female in his nature. Agdistis was the local name of

this enigmatic character, whom the gods feared and mutilated. From the

blood grew up, as in so many myths, an almond tree. The daughter of

Sangarius, Nana, placed some of the fruit in her bosom, and thereby

became pregnant, like the girl in the Kalewala by the berry, or the

mother of Huitzilopochtli, in Mexico, by the floating feather. The

same set of ideas recurs in Grimm's _Maerchen Machandelhoom_,* if we may

suppose that in an older form the juniper tree and its berries aided

the miraculous birth.** It is customary to see in these wild myths a

reflection of the Phrygian religious tradition, which leads up to the

birth of Atys, who again is identified with Adonis as a hero of the

spring and the reviving year. But the story has been introduced in

this place as an example of the manner in which floating myths from all

sources gravitate towards one great name and personality, like that of

Zeus. It would probably be erroneous to interpret these and many

other myths in the vast legend of Zeus, as if they had originally and

intentionally described the phenomena of the heavens. They are, more

probably, mere accretions round the figure of Zeus conceived as a

personal god, a "magnified non-natural man".***

* Mrs. Hunt's translation, i. 187.

** For parallels to this myth in Chinese, Aztec, Indian,

Phrygian and other languages, see _Le Fils de la Vierge_, by

M. H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. See also "Les Deux Freres"

in M. Maspero's _Contes Egyptians_

***As to the Agdistis myth, M. de Charency writes (after

quoting forms of the tale from all parts of the world),

"This resemblance between different shapes of the same

legend, among nations separated by such expanses of land and

sea, may be brought forward as an important proof of the

antiquity of the myth, as well as of the distant date at

which it began to be diffused".

Another example of local accretion is the fable that Zeus, after

carrying off Ganymede to be his cupbearer, made atonement to the

royal family of Troy by the present of a vine of gold fashioned by

Hephaestus.* The whole of the myth of Callisto, again, whom Zeus loved,

and who bore Areas, and later was changed into a bear, and again into

a star, is clearly of local Arcadian origin. If the Arcadians, in very

remote times, traced their descent from a she-bear, and if they also,

like other races, recognised a bear in the constellation, they would

naturally mix up those fables later with the legend of the all-powerful

Zeus.**

* Scholia on _Odyssey_, xL 521; Iliad, xx. 234; Eurip.,

Orestes, 1392, and Scholiast quoting the _Little Iliad_.

** Compare C. O. Mueller, _Introduction to a Scientific

System of Mythology_, London, 1884, pp. 16,17; Pausaniaa, i

25, 1, viii. 35, 7.

So far we have studied some of the details in the legend of Zeus which

did not conspicuously win their way into the national literature. The

object has been to notice a few of the myths which appear the most

ancient, and the most truly native and original. These are the

traditions preserved in mystery-plays, tribal genealogies, and temple

legends, the traditions surviving from the far off period of the village

Greeks. It has already been argued, in conformity with the opinion of C.

O. Mueller, that these myths are most antique and thoroughly local. "Any

attempt to explain these myths in order, such, for instance, as we now

find them in the collection of Apollodorus, as a system of thought

and knowledge, must prove a fruitless task." Equally useless is it to

account for them all as stories originally told to describe, consciously

or unconsciously, or to explain any atmospheric and meteorological

phenomena. Zeus is the bright sky; granted, but the men who told how he

became an ant, or a cuckoo, or celebrated a sham wedding with a wooden

image, or offered Troy a golden vine, "the work of Hephaestus," like

other articles of jewellery, were not thinking of the bright sky when

they repeated the story. They were merely strengthening some ancient

family or tribal tradition by attaching it to the name of a great,

powerful, personal being, an immortal. This being, not the elemental

force that was Zeus, not the power "making for righteousness" that is

Zeus, not the pure spiritual ruler of the world, the Zeus of philosophy,

is the hero of the myths that have been investigated.

In the tales that actually won their way into national literature,

beginning with Homer, there is observable the singular tendency to

combine, in one figure, the highest religious ideas with the fables of a

capricious, and often unjust and lustful supernatural being. Taking the

myths first, their contrast with the religious conception of Zeus will

be the more remarkable.

Zeus is the king of all gods and father of some, but he cannot keep his

subjects and family always in order. In the first book of the _Iliad_,

Achilles reminds his mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, how she once "rescued

the son of Cronus, lord of the storm-clouds, from shameful wreck, when

all other Olympians would have bound him, even Hera, and Poseidon, and

Pallas Athene ". Thetis brought the hundred-handed Briareus to the help

of the outnumbered and over-mastered Zeus. Then Zeus, according to

the Scholiast, hung Hera out of heaven in chains, and gave Apollo

and Poseidon for slaves to Laomedon, king of Troy. So lively was the

recollection of this _coup d'etat_ in Olympus, that Hephaestus implores

Hera (his mother in Homer) not to anger Zeus, "lest I behold thee, that

art so dear, chastised before mine eyes, and then shall I not be able to

save thee for all my sorrow".* He then reminds Hera how Zeus once

tossed him out of heaven (as the Master of Life tossed Ataentsic in the

Iroquois myth), and how he fell in Lemnos, "and little life was left in

me". The passage is often interpreted as if the fall of Hephaestus, the

fire-god, were a myth of lightning; but in Homer assuredly the incident

has become thoroughly personal, and is told with much humour. The

offence of Hera was the raising of a magic storm (which she could do as

well as any Lapland witch) and the wrecking of Heracles on Cos. For

this she was chained and hung out of heaven, as on the occasion already

described.**

* Iliad, i. 587.

** Ibid., 590; Scholia, xiv. 255. The myth

is derived from Pherecydes.

The constant bickerings between Hera and Zeus in the _Iliad_ are merely

the reflection in the upper Olympian world of the wars and jealousies of

men below. Ilios is at war with Argos and Mycenae, therefore the chief

protecting gods of each city take part in the strife. This conception is

connected with the heroic genealogies. Noble and royal families, as in

most countries, feigned a descent from the gods. It followed that Zeus

was a partisan of his "children," that is, of the royal houses in the

towns where he was the most favoured deity. Thus Hera when she sided

with Mycenae had a double cause of anger, and there is an easy answer to

the question, _quo numine laeso?_ She had her own townsmen's quarrel to

abet, and she had her jealousy to incite her the more; for to become

father of the human families Zeus must have been faithless to her.

Indeed, in a passage (possibly interpolated) of the fourteenth _Iliad_

he acts as his own Leporello, and recites the list of his conquests.

The Perseidae, the Heraclidae, the Pirithoidae, with Dionysus, Apollo and

Artemis spring from the amours there recounted.* Moved by such passions,

Hera urges on the ruin of Troy, and Zeus accuses her of a cannibal

hatred. "Perchance wert thou to enter within the gates and long walls,

and devour Priam raw, and Priam's sons, and all the Trojans, then

mightest thou assuage thine anger."** That great stumbling-block of

Greek piety, the battle in which the gods take part,*** was explained as

a physical allegory by the Neo-Platonists.**** It is in reality only a

refraction of the wars of men, a battle produced among the heavenly folk

by men's battles, as the earthly imitations of rain in the Vedic ritual

beget rain from the firmament. The favouritism which Zeus throughout

shows to Athene***** is explained by that rude and ancient myth of her

birth from his brain after he had swallowed her pregnant mother.******

* Pherecydes is the authority for the treble night, in

which Zeus persuaded the sun not to rise when he wooed

Alemena.

** See the whole passage, Iliad, iv. 160.

*** Ibid., v. 385.

**** Scholia, ed. Dindorf, vol iii.; Ibid., v. 886.

*****Ibid., v. 875.

****** Cf. "Hymn to Apollo Pythius," 136.

But Zeus cannot allow the wars of the gods to go on unreproved, and* he

asserts his power, and threatens to cast the offenders into Tartarus,

"as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above earth". Here the supremacy

of Zeus is attested, and he proposes to prove it by the sport called

"the tug of war". He says, "Fasten ye a chain of gold from heaven, and

all ye gods lay hold thereof, and all goddesses, yet could ye not drag

from heaven to earth Zeus, the supreme counsellor, not though ye strove

sore. But if once I were minded to drag with all my heart, then I could

hang gods and earth and sea to a pinnacle of Olympus."** The supremacy

claimed here on the score of strength, "by so much I am beyond gods and

men," is elsewhere based on primogeniture,*** though in Hesiod Zeus is

the youngest of the sons of Cronos. But there is, as usual in myth, no

consistent view, and Zeus cannot be called omnipotent. Not only is he

subject to fate, but his son Heracles would have perished when he went

to seek the hound of hell but for the aid of Athene.**** Gratitude for

his relief does not prevent Zeus from threatening Athene as well as

Hera with Tartarus, when they would thwart him in the interest of the

Achaeans. Hera is therefore obliged to subdue him by the aid of love and

sleep, in that famous and beautiful passage,***** which is so frankly

anthropomorphic, and was such a scandal to religious minds.******

* Iliad, viii. ad init.

** M. Decharme regards this challenge to the tug of war as a

very noble and sublime assertion of supreme sovereignty.

Myth, de la Greece, p. 19.

*** Iliad, xv. 166.

**** Ibid., viii. 369. *****Ibid., adv. 160-350.

****** Schol. Iliad, xiv. 346; Dindorf, vol. iv. In the

Scholiast's explanation the scene is an allegorical

description of spring; the wrath of Hera is the remains of

winter weather; her bath represents the April showers; when

she busks her hair, the new leaves on the boughs, "the high

leafy tresses of the trees," are intended, and so forth. Not

to analyse the whole divine plot of the _Iliad_, such is

Zeus in the mythical portions of the epic. He is the father

and master of gods and men, and the strongest; but he may be

opposed, he may be deceived and cajoled; he is hot-

tempered, amorous, luxurious, by no means omnipotent or

omniscient. He cannot avert even from his children the doom

that Fate span into the threads at their birth; he is no

more omniscient than omnipotent, and if he can affect the

weather, and bring storm and cloud, so at will can the other

deities, and so can any sorcerer, or Jossakeed, or Biraark

of the lower races.

In Homeric religion, as considered apart from myth, in the religious

thoughts of men at solemn moments of need, or dread, or prayer, Zeus

holds a far other place. All power over mortals is in his hands, and is

acknowledged with almost the fatalism of Islam. "So meseems it pleaseth

mighty Zeus, who hath laid low the head of many a city, yea, and shall

lay low, for his is the highest power."* It is Zeus who gives sorrows to

men,** and he has, in a mythical picture, two jars by him full of evil

and good, which he deals to his children on earth. In prayer*** he is

addressed as Zeus, most glorious, most great, veiled in the storm-cloud,

that dwelleth in the heaven. He gives his sanction to the oath:****

* _Iliad_, ii. 177.

** Ibid., 378.

*** Ibid., 408.

**** Ibid., iii 277.

"Thou sun, that seest all, Father Zeus, that rulest from Ida, most

glorious, most great, and things, and nearest all things, and ye rivers,

and thou earth, and ye that in the underworld punish men forsworn,

whosoever sweareth falsely, be ye witnesses, and watch over the faithful

oath". Again it is said: "Even if the Olympian bring not forth the

fulfilment" (of the oath) "at once, yet doth he fulfil at the last, and

men make dear amends, even with their own heads, and their wives and

little ones".* Again, "Father Zeus will be no helper of liars ".**

As to the religious sentiment towards Zeus of a truly devout man in

that remote age, Homer has left us no doubt. In Eumaeus the swineherd of

Odysseus, a man of noble birth stolen into slavery when a child, Homer

has left a picture of true religion and undefiled. Eumaeus attributes

everything that occurs to the will of the gods, with the resignation of

a child of Islam or a Scot of the Solemn League and Covenant.***

"From Zeus are all strangers and beggars," he says, and believes that

hospitality and charity are well pleasing in the sight of the Olympian.

When he flourishes, "it is God that increaseth this work of mine whereat

I abide". He neither says "Zeus" nor "the gods," but in this passage

simply "god". "Verily the blessed gods love not froward deeds, but they

reverence justice and the righteous acts of men;" yet it is "Zeus that

granteth a prey to the sea-robbers". It is the gods that rear Telemachus

like a young sapling, yet is it the gods who "mar his wits within him"

when he sets forth on a perilous adventure. It is to Zeus Cronion that

the swineherd chiefly prays,**** but he does not exclude the others from

his supplication.*****

* _Iliad_, iv. 160.

** Ibid., iv. 236.

*** _Odyssey_, xiv. passim,

**** Ibid., 406.

***** _Odyssey_, iv. 423.

Being a man of scrupulous piety, when he slays a swine for supper, he

only sets aside a seventh portion "for Hermes and the nymphs" who

haunt the lonely uplands.** Yet his offering has no magical intent

of constraining the immortals. "One thing God will give, and another

withhold, even as he will, for with him all things are possible."***

Such is a Homeric ideal of piety, and it would only gain force from

contrast with the blasphemy of Aias, "who said that in the god's despite

he had escaped the great deep of the sea ".****

** Ibid., xiv. 435.

*** Ibid., 444, 445.

**** Ibid., iv. 504.

The epics sufficiently prove that a noble religion may coexist with a

wild and lawless mythology. That ancient sentiment of the human heart

which makes men listen to a human voice in the thunder and yearn for

immortal friends and helpers, lives its life little disturbed by the

other impulse which inspires men when they come to tell stories and

romances about the same transcendent beings.

As to the actual original form of the faith in Zeus, we can only make

guesses. To some it will appear that Zeus was originally the clear

bright expanse which was taken for an image or symbol of the infinite.

Others will regard Zeus as the bright sky, but the bright sky conceived

of in savage fashion, as a being with human parts and passions, a being

with all the magical accomplishments of metamorphosis, rain-making

and the rest, with which the medicine-man is credited. A third set

of mythologists, remembering how gods and medicine-men have often

interchangeable names, and how, for example, the Australian Biraark, who

is thought to command the west wind, is himself styled "West Wind," will

derive Zeus from the ghost of some ancestral sorcerer named "Sky". This

euhemerism seems an exceedingly inadequate explanation of the origin

of Zeus. In his moral aspect Zeus again inherits the quality of that

supernatural and moral watcher of man's deeds who is recognised (as

we have seen) even by the most backward races, and who, for all we can

tell, is older than any beast-god or god of the natural elements. Thus,

whatever Zeus was in his earliest origin, he had become, by the time we

can study him in ritual, poem or sacred chapter, a complex of qualities

and attributes, spiritual, moral, elemental, animal and human.

It is curious that, on our theory, the mythical Zeus must have morally

degenerated at a certain period as the Zeus of religion more and

more approached the rank of a pure and almost supreme deity. On

our hypothesis, it was while Greece was reaching a general national

consciousness, and becoming more than an aggregate of small local

tribes, that Zeus attracted the worst elements of his myth. In deposing

or relegating to a lower rank a crowd of totems and fetishes and

ancestral ghosts, he inherited the legends of their exploits. These were

attached to him still more by the love of genealogies derived from the

gods. For each such pedigree an amour was inevitably invented, and,

where totems had existed, the god in this amour borrowed the old bestial

form. For example, if a Thessalian stock had believed in descent from an

ant, and wished to trace their pedigree to Zeus, they had merely to say,

"Zeus was that ant". Once more, as Zeus became supreme among the other

deities of men in the patriarchal family condition, those gods were

grouped round him as members of his family, his father, mother,

brothers, sisters, wife, mistresses and children. Here was a noble

field in which the mythical fancy might run riot; hence came stories

of usurpations, rebellions, conjugal skirmishes and jealousies, a whole

world of incidents in which humour had free play. Nor would foreign

influences be wanting. A wandering Greek, recognising his Zeus in a

deity of Phoenicia or Babylon, might bring home some alien myth which

would take its place in the general legend, with other myths imported

along with foreign objects of art, silver bowls and inlaid swords. Thus

in all probability grew the legend of the Zeus of myth, certainly a

deplorable legend, while all the time the Greek intellect was purifying

itself and approaching the poetical, moral and philosophical conception

of the Zeus of religion. At last, in the minds of the philosophically

religious, Zeus became pure deity, and the details of the legend were

explained away by this or that system of allegory; while in the minds

of the sceptical, Zeus yielded his throne to the "vortex" of the

Aristophanic comedy. Thus Zeus may have begun as a kindly supreme being;

then aetiological and totemistic myths may have accrued to his legend,

and, finally, philosophic and pious thought introduced a rational

conception of his nature. But myth lived on, ritual lived on, and human

victims were slain on the altars of Zeus till Christianity was the

established religion. "Solet it be," says Pausanias, "as it hath been

from the beginning."

The gods who fill the court of Zeus and surround his throne are so

numerous that a complete account of each would exceed the limits of our

space. The legend of Zeus is typical, on the whole, of the manner in

which the several mythical chapters grew about the figures of each of

the deities. Some of these were originally, it is probable, natural

forces or elemental phenomena, conceived of at first as personal beings;

while, later, the personal earth or sun shaded off into the informing

genius of the sun or earth, and still later was almost freed from all

connection with the primal elemental phenomenon or force. In these

processes of evolution it seems to have happened occasionally that the

god shed, like a shell or chrysalis, his original form, which continued

to exist, however, as a deity of older family and inferior power. By

such processes, at least, it would not be difficult to explain the

obvious fact that several gods have "under-studies" of their parts

in the divine comedy. It may be well to begin a review of the gods by

examining those who were, or may be supposed to have been, originally

forces or phenomena of Nature.

APOLLO.

This claim has been made for almost all the Olympians, but in some cases

appears more plausible than in others. For example, Apollo is regarded

as a solar divinity, and the modes in which he attained his detached

and independent position as a brilliant anthropomorphic deity, patron

of art, the lover of the nymphs, the inspirer of prophecy, may have been

something in this fashion. First the sun may have been regarded (in the

manner familiar to savage races) as a personal being. In Homer he is

still the god "who sees and hears all things,"* and who beholds and

reveals the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. This personal character of the

sun is well illustrated in the Homeric hymn to Hyperion, the sun that

dwells on high, where, as Mr. Max Mueller says, "the words would seem to

imply that the poet looked upon Helios as a half-god, almost as a hero,

who had once lived upon earth".** It has already been shown that this

mythical theory of the origin of the sun is met with among the Aztecs

and the Bushmen.*** In Homer, the sun, Helios Hyperion, though he sees

and hears all things,**** needs to be informed by one of the nymphs that

the companions of Odysseus have devoured his sacred cattle. In the same

way the supreme Baiame of Australia needs to ask questions of mortals.

Apollo then speaks in the Olympian assembly, and threatens that if he is

not avenged he will "go down to Hades and shine among the dead". The

sun is capable of marriage, as in the Bulgarian _Volkslied_, where he

marries a peasant girl,***** and, by Perse, he is the father of Circe

and AEetes.******

* _Odyssey_, viii. 270.

** _Selected Essays_, i. 605, note 1.

*** "Nature Myths," antea.

**** _Iliad_, iii. 277.

***** Dozon, _Chansons Bulgares_.

****** _Odyssey_, x. 139.

According to the early lyric poet Stesichorus, the sun sails over ocean

in a golden cup or bowl. "Then Helios Hyperionides went down into his

golden cup to cross Ocean-stream, and come to the deeps of dark and

sacred Night, to his mother, and his wedded wife, and his children

dear." This belief, in more barbaric shape, still survives in the Greek

islands.* "The sun is still to them a giant, like Hyperion, bloodthirsty

when tinged with gold. The common saying is that the sun 'when he

seeks his kingdom' expects to find forty loaves prepared for him by

his mother.... Woe to her if the loaves be not ready! The sun eats his

brothers, sisters, father and mother in his wrath."** A well-known amour

of Helios was his intrigue with Rhode by whom he had Phaethon and his

sisters. The tragedians told how Phaethon drove the chariot of the sun,

and upset it, while his sisters were turned into poplar trees, and their

tears became amber.***

* Bent's _Cyclades_, p. 57.

** Stesichorus, _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_, Pomtow, vol. i. p.

148; qf. also Mimnermus, op. cit.,i. 78.

*** _Odyssey_, xvii. 208; Scholiast. The story is ridiculed

by Lucian, De Electro.

Such were the myths about the personal sun, the hero or demigod, Helios

Hyperion. If we are to believe that Apollo also is a solar deity, it

appears probable that he is a more advanced conception, not of the sun

as a person, but of a being who represents the sun in the spiritual

world, and who exercises, by an act of will, the same influence as the

actual sun possesses by virtue of his rays. Thus he brings pestilence

on the Achaeans in the first book of the _Iliad_, and his viewless shafts

slay men suddenly, as sunstroke does. It is a pretty coincidence that a

German scholar, Otfried Mueller, who had always opposed Apollo's claim

to be a sun-god, was killed by a sunstroke at Delphi. The god avenged

himself in his ancient home. But if this deity was once merely the sun,

it may be said, in the beautiful phrase of Paul de St. Victor, "Pareil a

une statue qui surgit des flammes de son moule, Apollo se degage vite du

soleil".* He becomes a god of manifold functions and attributes, and it

is necessary to exercise extreme caution in explaining any one myth of

his legend as originally a myth of the sun.** _Phoibos_ certainly means

"the brilliant" or "shining". It is, however, unnecessary to hold that

such epithets as _Lyceius, Lycius, Lycegenes_ indicate "light," and are

not connected, as the ancients, except Macrobius, believed, with the

worship of the wolf.*** The character of Apollo as originally a sun-god

is asserted on the strength not only of his names, but of many of his

attributes and his festivals. It is pointed out that he is the deity who

superintends the measurement of time.**** "The chief days in the year's

reckoning, the new and full moons and the seventh and twentieth days of

the month, also the beginning of the solar year, are reckoned Apolline."

That curious ritual of the Daphnephoria, familiar to many English people

from Sir Frederick Leighton's picture, is believed to have symbolised

the year. Proclus says that a staff of olive wood decorated with flowers

supported a central ball of brass beneath which was a smaller ball, and

thence little globes were hung.*****

* _Homines et Dieux_, p. 11.

** There is no agreement nor certainty about the etymology

and original meaning of the name Apollo. See Preller, Or.

Myth., i. 189. "Comparative philologists have not yet

succeeded in finding the true etymology of Apollo" (Max

Mueller, _Selected Essays_, i. 467).

*** Compare Zeus Lyceius and his wolf-myths; compare also

Roscher, _Ausfukrliches_ Lexikon, p. 423.

**** _Sonnengott als Zeitordner_, Roscher, op. cit., p. 423.

***** Cf. Photius, Bibl.,321.

The greater ball means the sun, the smaller the moon, the tiny globes

the stars and the 365 laurel garlands used in the feast are understood

to symbolise the days. Pausanias* says that the ceremony was of extreme

antiquity. Heracles had once been the youth who led the procession, and

the tripod which Amphitryon dedicated for him was still to be seen

at Thebes in the second century of our era. Another proof of Apollo's

connection with the sun is derived from the cessation of his rites at

Delphi during the three winter months which were devoted to Dionysus.**

The sacred birthday feasts of the god are also connected with the year's

renewal.*** Once more, his conflict with the great dragon, the Pytho,

is understood as a symbol of the victory of light and warmth over the

darkness and cold of winter.

The discomfiture of a dragon by a god is familiar in the myth of the

defeat of Ahi or Vritra by Indra, and it is a curious coincidence that

Apollo, like Indra, fled in terror after slaying his opponent. Apollo,

according to the myth, was purified of the guilt of the slaying (a

ceremony unknown to Homer) at Tempe.**** According to the myth, the

Python was a snake which forbade access to the chasm whence rose the

mysterious fumes of divination. Apollo slew the snake and usurped the

oracle. His murder of the serpent was more or less resented by the

Delphians of the time.*****

* i ix. 10, 4.

** Plutarch, Depa El. Delph., 9.

*** Roscher, op. cit., p. 427.

**** Proclus, Chresl, ed. Gaisford, p. 387; Homer, Hymn to

Apollo, 122, 178; Apollod., i. 4, 3; Plutarch, Quaest.

Groec., 12.

***** Apollod., Heyne, Observationes, p. 19. Compare the

Scholiast on the argument to Pindar's Pythian odes.

The snake, like the other animals, frogs and lizards, in Andaman,

Australian and Iroquois myth, had swallowed the waters before its

murder.* Whether the legend of the slaying of the Python was or was not

originally an allegory of the defeat of winter by sunlight, it certainly

at a very early period became mixed up with ancient legal ideas and

local traditions. It is almost as necessary for a young god or hero to

slay monsters as for a young lady to be presented at court; and we may

hesitate to explain all these legends of an useful feat of courage as

nature-myths. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo Pythius, the monster is

called _Dracaena_, the female form of _drakon_. The Drakos and his wife

are still popular bogies in modern Greek superstition and folk-song.**

* Preller, i. 194.

** Forchhammer takes the _Dracaena_ to be a violent winter

torrent, dried up by the sun's rays. Cf. Decharme, Myth.

Orec., p. 100. It is also conjectured that the snake is only

the sacred serpent of the older oracle of the earth on the

same site. AEschylus, _Eumenides_, 2.

The monster is the fosterling of Hera in the Homeric hymn, and the bane

of flocks and herds. She is somehow connected with the fable of the

birth of the monster Typhoeus, son of Hera without a father. The Homeric

hymn derives _Pythius_, the name of the god, from (------), "rot," the

disdainful speech of Apollo to the dead monster, "for there the

pest rotted away beneath the beams of the sun". The derivation is a

_volks-etymologie_. It is not clear whether the poet connected in his

mind the sun and the god. The local legend of the dragon-slaying was

kept alive in men's minds at Delphi by a mystery-play, in which the

encounter was represented in action. In one version of the myth the

slavery of Apollo in the house of Admetus was an expiation of the

dragon's death.* Through many of the versions runs the idea that the

slaying of the serpent was a deed which required purification and almost

apology. If the serpent was really the deity of an elder faith, this

would be intelligible, or, if he had kinsfolk, a serpent-tribe in the

district, we could understand it. Apollo's next act was to open a new

spring of water, as the local nymph was hostile and grudged him her own.

This was an inexplicable deed in a sun god, whose business it is to dry

up rather than to open water-springs. He gave oracles out of the laurel

of Delphi, as Zeus out of the oaks of Dodona.** Presently Apollo changed

himself into a huge dolphin, and in this guise approached a ship of

the Cretan mariners.*** He guided, in his dolphin shape, the vessel to

Crisa, the port of Delphi, and then emerged splendid from the waters,

and filled his fane with light, a sun-god indeed Next, assuming the

shape of a man, he revealed himself to the Cretans, and bade

them worship him in his _Delphic_ seat as Apollo Delphinios, the

Dolphin-Apollo.

* Eurip., Alcestis, Schol., line 1.

** Hymn, 215.

*** Op. cit., 220-225.

Such is the ancient tale of the founding of the Delphic oracle, in which

gods, and beasts, and men are mixed in archaic fashion. It is open to

students to regard the dolphin as only one of the many animals whose

earlier worship is concentrated in Apollo, or to take the creature for

the symbol of spring, when seafaring becomes easier to mortals, or to

interpret the dolphin as the result of a _volks-etymologie_, in which

the name Delphi (meaning originally a hollow in the hills) was connected

with _delphis_, the dolphin.*

On the whole, it seems impossible to get a clear view of Apollo as a

sun-god from a legend built out of so many varied materials of different

dates as the myth of the slaying of the Python and the founding of the

Delphic oracle. Nor does the tale of the birth of the god--_les enfances

Apollon_--yield much more certain information. The most accessible and

the oldest form of the birth-myth is preserved in the Homeric hymn to

the Delian Apollo, a hymn intended for recital at the Delian festival of

the Ionian people.

The hymn begins without any account of the amours of Zeus and Leto; it

is merely said that many lands refused to allow Leto a place wherein to

bring forth her offspring. But barren Delos listened to her prayer, and

for nine days Leto was in labour, surrounded by all the goddesses, save

jealous Hera and Eilithyia, who presides over child-birth. To her Iris

went with the promise of a golden necklet set with amber studs, and

Eilithyia came down to the isle, and Leto, grasping the trunk of a palm

tree, brought forth Apollo and Artemis.**

Such is the narrative of the hymn, in which some interpreters, such

as M. Decharme, find a rich allegory of the birth of Light. Leto is

regarded as Night or Darkness, though it is now admitted that this

meaning cannot be found in the etymology of her name.***

* Roscher, Lexikon; Preller, i. 208; Schol. ad Lycophr., v.

208.

** Compare Theognis, 5-10.

*** Preller, i. 190, note 4; Curtius, Gr. AE, 120.

M. Decharme presumes that the palm tree (------) originally meant the

morning red, by aid of which night gives birth to the sun, and if the

poet says the young god loves the mountain tops, why, so does the star

of day. The moon, however, does not usually arise simultaneously with

the dawn, as Artemis was born with Apollo. It is vain, in fact, to look

for minute touches of solar myth in the tale, which rests on the womanly

jealousy of Hera, and explains the existence of a great fane and feast

of Apollo, not in one of the rich countries that refused his mother

sanctuary, but in a small barren and remote island.*

Among the wilder myths which grouped themselves round the figure of

Apollo was the fable that his mother Leto was changed into a wolf. The

fable ran that Leto, in the shape of a wolf, came in twelve days

from the Hyperboreans to Delos.** This may be explained as a

_volks-etymologie_ from the god's name, "Lycegenes," which is generally

held to mean "born of light". But the presence of very many animals

in the Apollo legend and in his temples, corresponding as it does to

similar facts already observed in the religion of the lower races, can

scarcely be due to popular etymologies alone. The Dolphin-Apollo has

already been remarked.

* The French excavators in Delos found the original unhewn

stone on which, in later days, the statue of the

anthropomorphic god was based.

** Aristotle, Hist. An., vi 86; Elian., N. A., iv. 4;

Schol. on Apol. Rhod., ii. 12

There are many traces of connection between Apollo and the wolf.

In Athens there was the Lyceum of Apollo Lukios, Wolf-Apollo, which

tradition connected with the primeval strife wherein AEgeus (goat-man)

defeated Lukios (wolfman). The Lukian Apollo was the deity of the

defeated side, as Athene of the AEgis (goat-skin) was the deity of the

victors.* The Argives had an Apollo of the same kind, and the wolf

was stamped on their coins.** According to Pausanias, when Danaus came

seeking the kingship of Argos, the people hesitated between him and

Gelanor. While they were in doubt, a wolf attacked a bull, and the

Argives determined that the bull should stand for Gelanor, the wolf for

Danaus. The wolf won; Danaus was made king, and in gratitude raised

an altar to _Apollo Lukios_, Wolf-Apollo. That is (as friends of the

totemic system would argue), a man of the wolf-stock dedicated a shrine

to the wolf-god.*** In Delphi the presence of a bronze image of a wolf

was explained by the story that a wolf once revealed the place where

stolen temple treasures were concealed. The god's beast looked after the

god's interest.**** In many myths the children of Apollo by mortal girls

were exposed, but fostered by wolves.***** In direct contradiction

with Pausanias, but in accordance with a common rule of mythical

interpretation, Sophocles****** calls Apollo "the wolf-slayer".

* Paus., i. 19, 4.

** Preller, i. 202, note 3; Paus., ii. 19, 3.

*** Encyc. Brit., s. v. "Sacrifice".

**** Paus., x. 14, 4.

***** Ant. Lib., 30.

****** _Electra_, 6., 222

It has very frequently happened that when animals were found closely

connected with a god, the ancients explained the fact indifferently

by calling the deity the protector or the destroyer of the beasts in

question. Thus, in the case of Apollo, mice were held sacred and were

fed in his temples in the Troad and elsewhere, the people of Hamaxitus

especially worshipping mice.* The god's name, Smintheus, was understood

to mean "Apollo of the Mouse," or "Mouse-Apollo ".** But while Apollo

was thus at some places regarded as the patron of mice, other narratives

declared that he was adored as Sminthian because from mice he had freed

the country. This would be a perfectly natural explanation if the

vermin which had once been sacred became a pest in the eyes of later

generations.***

Flies were in this manner connected with the services of Apollo. It has

already been remarked that an ox was sacrificed to flies near the

temple of Apollo in Leucas. The sacrifice was explained as a device for

inducing flies to settle in one spot, and leave the rest of the coast

clear. This was an expensive, and would prove a futile arrangement.

There was a statue of the Locust-Apollo (Parnopios) in Athena The

story ran that it was dedicated after the god had banished a plague of

locusts.****

* AElian, H. A., xii. 6.

** Strabo, xiii. 604.

*** It is the explanation Preller gives of the Mouse-Apollo,

i. 202.

**** Paus., i. 24, 8; Strabo, xiii. 912.

A most interesting view of the way in which pious heathens of a late

age regarded Apollo's menagerie may be got from Plutarch's essay on the

Delphic responses. It is the description of a visit to Delphi. In the

hall of the Corinthians the writer and his friends examine the sacred

palm tree of bronze, and "the snakes and frogs in relief round the root

of the tree". "Why," said they, "the palm tree is not a marsh plant, and

frogs are not a Corinthian crest." And indeed one would think ravens and

swans, and hawks and wolves, and anything else than these reptiles

would be agreeable to the god. Then one of the visitors, Serapion, very

learnedly showed that Apollo was the sun, and that the sun arises

from water. "Still slipping into the story your lightings up and your

exhalations," cried Plutarch, and chaffed him, as one might chaff Kuhn,

or Schwartz, or Decharme, about his elemental interpretations. In fact,

the classical writers knew rather less than we do about the origin of

many of their religious peculiarities.

In connection with sheep, again, Apollo was worshipped as the ram

Apollo.* At the festival of the Carneia a ram was his victim.** These

facts are commonly interpreted as significant of the god's care for

shepherds and the pastoral life, a memory of the days when Apollo kept

a mortal's sheep and was the hind of Admetus of Thessaly. He had animal

names derived from sheep and goats, such as _Maloeis Tragios_.*** The

tale which made Apollo the serf and shepherd of mortal men is as old as

the _Iliad_,**** and is not easy to interpret, whether as a nature-myth

or a local legend. Laomedon, one of Apollo's masters, not only refused

him his wage, but threatened to put him in chains and sell him to

foreign folk across the sea, and to crop his ears with the blade of

bronze. These legends may have brought some consolation to the hearts of

free men enslaved. A god had borne like calamities, and could feel for

their affliction.

* Karneios, from (Heyschius, s.v.), a ram.

** Theocritus, Idyll, v. 8a

*** Preller, i. 215, note 1.

**** ii. 766. xxi. 448.

To return to the beasts of Apollo, in addition to dolphins, mice, rams

and wolves, he was constantly associated with lizards (powerful totems

in Australia), cicalas, hawks, swans, ravens, crows, vultures, all of

which are, by mythologists, regarded as symbols of the sun-god, in one

or other capacity or function. In the _Iliad_,* Apollo puts on the gear

of a hawk, and flits on hawk's wings down Ida, as the Thlinkeet Yehl

does on the feathers of a crane or a raven.

* xv. 287.

The loves of Apollo make up a long and romantic chapter in his legend.

They cannot all be so readily explained, as are many of the loves of

Zeus, by the desire to trace genealogical pedigrees to a god. It is on

this principle, however, that the birth of Ion, for example, is to be

interpreted. The ideal eponymous hero of the Ionian race was naturally

feigned to be the son of the deity by whose fatherhood all Ionians

became "brethren in Apollo". Once more, when a profession like that of

medicine was in the hands of a clan conceiving themselves to be of

one blood, and when their common business was under the protection of

Apollo, they inevitably traced their genealogy to the god. Thus the

medical clan of the Asclepiadae, of which Aristotle was a member, derived

their origin from Asclepius or (as the Romans called him) AEsculapius.

So far everything in this myth appears natural and rational, granting

the belief in the amours of an anthropomorphic god. But the details of

the story are full of that _irrational_ element which is said to "make

mythology mythological". In the third Pythian ode Pindar sings how

Apollo was the lover of Coronis; how she was faithless to him with a

stranger. Pindar does not tell how the crow or the raven flew to Apollo

with the news, and how the god cursed the crow, which had previously

been white, that it should for ever be black. Then he called his sister,

Artemis, to slay the false nymph, but snatched from her funeral pyre the

babe Asclepius, his own begotten. This myth, which explains the colour

of the crow as the result of an event and a divine curse, is an example

of the stage of thought already illustrated in the Namaqua myth of

Heitsi Eibib, and the peculiarities which his curse attached to various

animals. There is also a Bushman myth according to which certain

blackbirds have white breasts, because some women once tied pieces

of white fat round their necks.* It is instructive to observe, as the

Scholiast on Pindar quotes Artemon, that Pindar omits the incident of

the crow as foolish and unworthy. Apollo, according to the ode, was

himself aware, in his omniscience, of the frailty of Coronis. But

Hesiod, a much earlier poet, tells the story in the usual way, with

the curse of the crow, and his consequent change of colour.** The whole

story, in its most ancient shape, and with the omissions suggested by

the piety of a later age, is an excellent example of the irrational

element in Greek myth, of its resemblance to savage myth, and of

the tendency of more advanced thought to veil or leave out features

revolting to pure religion.***

* Bleek, _Bushman Folk-Lore_; Pindar, _Pyth_., iii, with

notes of the Scholiast.

** Pindar, Estienne, Geneva, 1599, p. 219.

*** For the various genealogies of Asclepius and a

discussion of the authenticity of the Hesiodic fragments,

see Roscher, _Lexikon_, pp. 615, 616.

The connection of Asclepius with the serpent was so close that he was

received into Roman religion in the form of a living snake, while dogs

were so intimately connected with his worship that Panofka believed

him to have been originally a dog-god (Roscher, p. 629, _Revue

Archeohgique_). In another myth Apollo succeeds to the paternal honours

of a totem. The Telmissians in Lycia claimed descent from Telmessus, who

was the child of an amour in which Apollo assumed the form of a dog. "In

this guise he lay with a daughter of Antenor." Probably the Lycians of

Telmissus originally derived their pedigree from a dog, _sans phrase_

and, later, made out that the dog was Apollo metamorphosed. This process

of veiling a totem, and explaining him away as a saint of the same name,

is common in modern India.*

* Suidas, His authority is Dionysius of Chalcis 200 BC,

See "Primitive Marriage in Bengal," Asiatic Quarterly,

June, 1886.

The other loves of Apollo are numerous, but it may be sufficient to have

examined one such story in detail. Where the tale of the amour was not a

necessary consequence of the genealogical tendency to connect clans with

gods, it was probably, as Roscher observes in the case of Daphne, an

AEtiological myth. Many flowers and trees, for example, were nearly

connected with the worship and ritual of Apollo; among these were

notably the laurel, cypress and hyacinth. It is no longer possible to do

more than conjecture why each of these plants was thus favoured, though

it is a plausible guess that the god attracted into his service various

local tree-worships and plant-worships. People would ask why the deity

was associated with the flowers and boughs, and the answer would be

readily developed on the familiar lines of nature-myth. The laurel is

dear to the god because the laurel was once a girl whom he pursued with

his love, and who, to escape his embraces, became a tree. The hyacinth

and cypress were beautiful youths, dear to Apollo, and accidentally

slain by him in sport. After their death they became flowers. Such myths

of metamorphoses, as has been shown, are an universal growth of savage

fancy, and spring from the want of a sense of difference between men and

things.*

The legend of Apollo has only been slightly sketched, but it is obvious

that many elements from many quarters enter into the sum of his myths

and rites.** If Apollo was originally the sun-god, it is certain that

his influence on human life and society was as wide and beneficent as

that of the sun itself. He presides over health and medicine, and over

purity of body and soul. He is the god of song, and the hexameter,

which first resounded in his temples, uttered its latest word in the

melancholy music of the last oracle from Delphi:--

Say to the king that the beautiful fane hath fallen asunder,

Phoebus no more hath a sheltering roof nor a sacred cell,

And the holy laurels are broken and wasted, and hushed is the wonder

Of water that spake as it flowed from the deeps of the Delphian well.

* See "Nature-Myths," antea. Schwartz, as usual, takes

Daphne to be connected, not with the dawn, but with

lightning. "Es ist der Gewitter-baum." Der Ursprung der

Mythologie, Berlin, 1860, pg. 160-162.

** For the influence of Apollo-worship on Greek

civilisation, see Curtius's History qf Greece, English

transl., vol. i. For a theory that Apollo answers to Mitra

among "the Arians of Iran," see Duncker's History of

Greece, vol, i. 173.

In his oracle he appears as the counsellor of men, between men and Zeus

he is a kind of mediator (like the son of Baiame in Australia, or of

Puluga in the Andaman isles), tempering the austerity of justice with

a yearning and kind compassion. He sanctifies the pastoral life by his

example, and, as one who had known bondage to a mortal, his sympathy

lightens the burden of the slave. He is the guide of colonists, he knows

all the paths of earth and all the ways of the sea, and leads wanderers

far from Greece into secure havens, and settles them on fertile shores.

But he is also the god before whom the Athenians first flogged and then

burned their human scapegoats.* His example consecrated the abnormal

post-Homeric vices of Greece. He is capable of metamorphosis into

various beasts, and his temple courts are thronged with images of frogs,

and mice, and wolves, and dogs, and ravens, over whose elder worship he

throws his protection. He is the god of sudden death; he is amorous and

revengeful. The fair humanities of old religion boast no figure more

beautiful; yet he, too, bears the birthmarks of ancient creeds, and

there is a shadow that stains his legend and darkens the radiance of his

glory.

* At the Thergelia. See Meursius, Graecia Feriata.

ARTEMIS.

If Apollo soon disengages himself from the sun, and appears as a deity

chiefly remarkable for his moral and prophetic attributes, Artemis

retains as few traces of any connection with the moon. "In the

development of Artemis may most clearly be distinguished," says Claus,

the progress of the human intellect from the early, rude, and, as

it were, natural ideas, to the fair and brilliant fancies of poets and

sculptors."*

* De Dianae Antiguisstma apud Graecos Natura, Vratialaviae,

1881.

There is no goddess more beautiful, pure and maidenly in the poetry of

Greece. There she shines as the sister of Apollo; her chapels are in the

wild wood; she is the abbess of the forest nymphs, "chaste and fair",

the maiden of the precise life, the friend of the virginal Hippolytus;

always present, even if unseen, with the pure of heart.* She is like

Milton's lady in the revel route of the _Comus_, and among the riot of

Olympian lovers she alone, with Athene, satisfies the ascetic longing

for a proud remoteness and reserve. But though it is thus that the poets

dream of her, from the author of the _Odyssey_ to Euripides, yet

the local traditions and cults of Artemis, in many widely separated

districts, combine her worship and her legend with hideous cruelties,

with almost cannibal rites, with relics of the wild worship of

the beasts whom, in her character as the goddess of the chase, she

"preserves" rather than protects. To her human victims are sacrificed;

for her bears, deer, doves, wolves, all the tameless herds of the hills

and forests are driven through the fire in Achaea. She is adored

with bear-dances by the Attic girls; there is a gloomy Chthonian or

sepulchral element in her worship, and she is even blended in ritual

with a monstrous many-breasted divinity of Oriental religion. Perhaps it

is scarcely possible to separate now all the tangled skeins in the mixed

conception of Artemis, or to lay the finger on the germinal conception

of her nature. "Dark," says Schreiber, "is the original conception,

obscure the meaning of the name of Artemis."**

* Hippolytus, Eurip., 73-87.

** Roscher's Lexikon, s. v.

It is certain that many tribal worships are blended in her legend and

each of two or three widely different notions of her nature may be

plausibly regarded as the most primitive. In the attempt to reach the

original notion of Artemis, philology offers her distracting aid and her

competing etymologies. What is the radical meaning of her name? On

this point Claus* has a long dissertation. In his opinion Artemis

was originally (as Dione) the wife, not the daughter, of Zeus, and he

examines the names Dione, Diana, concluding that Artemis, Dione and

Diana are essentially one, and that Diana is the feminine of Janus

(Djanus), corresponding to the Greek. As to the etymology of Artemis,

Curtis wisely professes himself uncertain.** A crowd of hypotheses have

been framed by more sanguine and less cautious etymologists. Artemis has

been derived from "safe," "unharmed," "the stainless maiden ". Goebel,3

suggests the root _arpar_ or _par_, "to shake," and makes Artemis

mean the thrower of the dart or the shooter. But this is confessedly

conjectural. The Persian language has also been searched for the root

of Artemis, which is compared with the first syllables in Artaphernes,

Artaxerxes, Artaxata, and so forth. It is concluded that Artemis would

simply mean "the great goddess ". Claus again, returning to his theory

of Artemis as originally the wife of Zeus, inclines to regard her as

originally the earth, the "mighty mother".****

* Roscher's Lexikon, s. v., p. 7.

** Etym. Or,, 5th ed., p. 556.

*** Lexilogus, i. 554.

**** For many other etymologies of Artemis, see Roscher's

Lexikon, p. 558. Among these is "she who cuts the air". Even

the bear, has occurred to inventive men.

As Schreiber observes, the philological guesses really throw no light

on the nature of Artemis. Welcker, Preller and Lauer take her for the

goddess of the midnight sky, and "the light of the night".* Claus, as

we have seen, is all for night, not light; for "Night is identical in

conception with the earth"--night being the shadow of earth, a fact

probably not known to the very early Greeks. Claus, however, seems well

inspired when he refuses to deduce all the many properties, myths and

attributes of Artemis from lunar aspects and attributes. The smallest

grain of ingenuity will always suffice as the essential element in this

mythological alchemy, this "transmutation" of the facts of legend into

so many presumed statements about any given natural force or phenomenon.

From all these general theories and vague hypotheses it is time to

descend to facts, and to the various local or tribal cults and myths of

Artemis. Her place in the artistic poetry, which wrought on and purified

those tales, will then be considered. This process is the converse of

the method, for example, of M. Decharme. He first accepts the "queen and

huntress, chaste and fair," of poetry, and then explains her local myths

and rituals as accidental corruptions of and foreign additions to that

ideal.

The Attic and Arcadian legends of Artemis are confessedly among the

oldest.**

* Welcker, Oriechische Gotterlehre, i. 561, Gottingen, 1867;

Preller, i. 239.

** Roscher, Lexikon, 580.

Both in Arcadia and Attica, the goddess is strangely connected with that

animal worship, and those tales of bestial metamorphosis, which are the

characteristic elements of myths and beliefs among the most backward

races.

The Arcadian myth of Artemis and the she-bear is variously narrated.

According to Pausanias, Lycaon, king of Arcadia, had a daughter,

Callisto, who was loved by Zeus. Hera, in jealous wrath, changed

Callisto into a she-bear; and Artemis, to please Hera, shot the beast.

At this time the she-bear was pregnant with a child by Zeus, who sent

Hermes to save the babe, Areas, just as Dionysus was saved at the

burning of Semele and Asclepius at the death of his mother, whom Apollo

slew. Zeus then transformed Callisto into a constellation, the bear.*

No more straightforward myth of descent from a beast (for the Arcadians

claimed descent from Areas, the she-bear's son) and of starry or bestial

metamorphosis was ever told by Cahrocs or Kamilaroi. Another story ran

that Artemis herself, in anger at the unchastity of Callisto, caused her

to become a bear. So the legend ran in a Hesiodic poem, according to the

extract in Eratosthenes.**

* Paus., viii. 3, 5.

** O. Mueller, Engl. transl., p. 15; Catast., i.; Apollodor.,

iii. 82; Hyginus, 176, 177. A number of less important

references are given in Bachofen's Der Bar in den Religionen

des Alterthums.

Such is the ancient myth, which Otfried Mueller endeavours to explain by

the light of his lucid common sense, without the assistance which we

can now derive from anthropological research. The nymph Callisto, in his

opinion, is a mere refraction from Artemis herself, under her Arcadian

and poetic name of Calliste, "the most beautiful". Hard by the tumulus

known as the grave of Callisto was a shrine, Pausanias tells us, of

Artemis _Calliste_.* Pamphos, he adds, was the first poet known to him

who praised Artemis by this title, and he learned it from the Arcadians.

Mueller next remarks on the attributes of Artemis in Athens, the Artemis

known as Brauronia. "Now," says he, "we set out from this, that the

circumstance of the goddess who is served at Brauron by she-bears having

a friend and companion changed into a bear, cannot possibly be a freak

of chance, but that this metamorphosis has its foundation in the fact

that the animal was sacred to the goddess."

It will become probable that the animal actually was mythically

identified with the goddess at an extremely remote period, or, at all

events, that the goddess succeeded to, and threw her protection over, an

ancient worship of the animal.

Passing then from Arcadia, where the friend of the goddess becomes a

she-bear, to Brauron and Munychia in Attica, we find that the local

Artemis there, an Artemis connected by legend with the fierce Taurian

goddess, is served by young girls, who imitate, in dances, the gait of

bears, who are called little bears, apktoi, and whose ministry is named

aptcreia, that is, "a playing the bear". Some have held that the girls

once wore bear-skins.**

* Paus., viii. 3.

** Claus, op. cit., p. 76. [Suchier, De Dian Brauron, p.

33.] The bearskin seems later to have been exchanged for a

saffron raiment. Compare Harpokration, Aristophanes,

_Lysistrata_, 646. The Scholiast on that passage collects

legendary explanations, setting forth that the rites were

meant to appease the goddess for the slaying of a tame bear

[cf. Apostolius, vii. 10]. Mr. Parnell has collected all the

lore in his work on the Cults of the Greek States.

Familiar examples in ancient and classical times of this religious

service by men in bestial guise are the wolf-dances of the Hirpi or

"wolves," and the use of the ram-skin in Egypt and Greece.* These

Brauronian rites point to a period when the goddess was herself a

bear, or when a bear-myth accrued to her legend, and this inference is

confirmed by the singular tradition that she was not only a bear, but a

bear who craved for human blood.**

* Servius. Jen. i. xi. 785. For a singular parallel in modern

French folk-lore to the dance of the Hirpi, see Mannhardt,

Wald und Feld Qultus, ii 824, 825. For the ram, see

Herodotus, ii. 42. In Thebes the ram's skin was in the

yearly festival flayed, and placed on the statue of the god.

Compare, in the case of the buzzard, Bancroft, iii. 168.

Great care is taken in preserving the skin of the sacrificed

totem, the buzzard, as it makes part of a sacred dress.

** Apostolius, viii. 19, vii. 10, quoted by O. Mueller (cf.

Welcker, i. 573).

The connection between the Arcadian Artemis, the Artemis of Brauron,

and the common rituals and creeds of totemistic worship is now, perhaps,

undeniably apparent. Perhaps in all the legend and all the cult of the

goddess there is no more archaic element than this. The speech of the

women in the _Lysistrata_, recalling the days of their childhood when

they "were bears," takes us back to a remote past when the tribes

settled at Brauron were bear-worshippers, and, in all probability,

claimed to be of the bear stock or kindred. Their distant descendants

still imitated the creature's movements in a sacred dance; and the

girls of Periclean Athens acted at that moment like the young men of the

Mandans or Nootkas in their wolf-dance or buffalo-dance. Two questions

remain unanswered: how did a goddess of the name of Artemis, and with

her wide and beneficent functions, succeed to a cult so barbarous? or

how, on the other hand, did the cult of a ravening she-bear develop into

the humane and pure religion of Artemis?

Here is a moment in mythical and religious evolution which almost

escapes our inquiry. We find, in actual historical processes, nothing

more akin to it than the relation borne by the Samoan gods to the

various animals in which they are supposed to be manifest. How did the

complex theory of the nature of Artemis arise? what was its growth? at

what precise hour did it emancipate itself on the whole from the

lower savage creeds? or how was it developed out of their unpromising

materials? The science of mythology may perhaps never find a key to

these obscure problems.*

* The symbolic explanation of Bachofen, Claus and others is

to the effect that the she-bear (to take that case) is a

beast in which the maternal instinct is very strong, and

apparently that the she-bear, deprived of her whelps, is a

fit symbol of a goddess notoriously virginal, and without

offspring.

The goddess of Brauron, succeeding probably to the cult of a she-bear,

called for human blood. With human blood the Artemis Orthia of Sparta

was propitiated. Of this goddess and her rights Pausanias tells a very

remarkable story. The image of the goddess, he declares, is barbarous;

which probably means that even among the archaic wooden idols of Greece

it seemed peculiarly savage in style. Astrabacus and Alopecus (the ass

and the fox), sons of Agis, are said to have found the idol in a bush,

and to have been struck mad at the sight of it. Those who sacrificed to

the goddess fell to blows and slew each other; a pestilence followed,

and it became clear that the goddess demanded human victims. "Her altar

must be drenched in the blood of men," the victim being chosen by lot.

Lycurgus got the credit of substituting the rite in which boys were

flogged before the goddess to the effusion of blood for the older human

sacrifices.* The Taurian Artemis, adored with human sacrifice, and

her priestess, Iphigenia, perhaps a form of the goddess, are familiar

examples of this sanguinary ritual.** Suchier is probably correct in

denying that these sacrifices are of foreign origin. They are closely

interwoven with the oldest idols and oldest myths of the districts least

open to foreign influence. An Achaean example is given by Pausanias.***

Artemis was adored with the offering of a beautiful girl and boy.

Not far from Brauron, at Halae, was a very ancient temple of Artemis

Tauropolos, in which blood was drawn from a man's throat by the edge

of the sword, clearly a modified survival of human sacrifice. The

whole connection of Artemis with Taurian rites has been examined by

Mueller,**** in his _Orchomenos_***** Horns grow from the shoulders of

Artemis Tauropolos, on the coins of Amphipolis, and on Macedonian coins

she rides on a bull. According to Decharme,****** the Taurian Artemis,

with her hideous rites, was confused, by an accidental resemblance of

names, with this Artemis Tauropolos, whose "symbol" was a bull, and who

(whatever we may think of the symbolic hypothesis) used bulls as her

"vehicle" and wore bull's horns.

* Paus., iii. 8,16. Cf. Mueller, Dorians, book ii. chap. 9,

6. Pausanias, viii. 23, 1, mentions a similar custom,

ordained by the Delphian oracle, the flogging of women at

the feast of Dionysus in Alea of Arcadia.

** Cf. Mueller, Dorians, it 9, 6, and Claus, op. cit., cap.

v.

*** Paus., vii. 19.

****Op. cit., ii. 9, 6.

***** Ibid., p. 311. Qf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 1424, and

Roscher, Lexikon, p. 568.

****** Mythol. de la Grece, p. 137.

Mueller, on the other hand,* believes the Greeks found in Tauria (i.e.,

Lemnos) a goddess with bloody "rites, whom they identified by reason of

those very human sacrifices, with their own Artemis Iphigenia". Their

own worship of that deity bore so many marks of ancient barbarism that

they were willing to consider the northern barbarians as its authors.

Yet it is possible that the Tauric Artemis was no more derived from the

Taurians than Artemis AEthiopia from the AEthiopians.

The nature of the famous Diana of the Ephesians, or Artemis of Ephesus,

is probably quite distinct in origin from either the Artemis of Arcadia

and Attica or the deity of literary creeds. As late as the time of

Tacitus** the Ephesians maintained that Leto's twins had been born in

their territory. "The first which showed themselves in the senate were

the Ephesians, declaring that Diana and Apollo were not born in the

island Delos, as the common people did believe; and there was in their

country a river called Cenchrius, and a wood called Ortegia, where

Latona, being great with child, and leaning against an olive tree which

is yet in that place, brought forth these two gods, and that by the

commandment of the gods the wood was made sacred."***

* Mythol. de la Grece, ii. 9, 7.

** Annals, iii. 61.

*** Greenwey's _Tacitus_, 1622.

This was a mere adaptation of the Delian legend, the olive (in Athens

sacred to Athene) taking the place of the Delian palm-tree. The real

Artemis of Ephesus, "the image that fell from heaven," was an Oriental

survival. Nothing can be less Greek in taste than her many-breasted

idol, which may be compared with the many-breasted goddess of the

beer-producing maguey plant in Mexico.*

The wilder elements in the local rites and myths of Diana are little if

at all concerned with the goddess in her Olympian aspect as the daughter

of Leto and sister of Apollo. It is from this lofty rank that she

descends in the national epic to combat on the Ilian

plain among warring gods and men. Claus has attempted, from a comparison

of the epithets applied to Artemis, to show that the poets of the Iliad

and the Odyssey take different views of her character. In the Iliad she

is a goddess of tumult and passion; in the Odyssey, a holy maiden with

the "gentle darts" that deal sudden and painless death. But in both

poems she is a huntress, and the death-dealing shafts are hers both in

Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps the apparent difference is due to nothing but

the necessity for allotting her a part in that battle of the Olympians

which rages in the Iliad. Thus Hera in the Iliad addresses her thus:**

"How now! art thou mad, bold vixen, to match thyself against me? Hard

were it for thee to match my might, bow-bearer though thou art, since

against women Zeus made thee a lion, and giveth thee to slay whomso of

them thou wilt. Truly it is better on the mountains to slay wild beasts

and deer than to fight with one that is mightier than thou."

* For an alabaster statuette of the goddess, see Roscher's

Lexikon, p. 588

** Iliad, xxi. 481.

These taunts of Hera, who always detests the illegitimate children of

Zeus, doubtless refer to the character of Artemis as the goddess of

childbirth. Here she becomes confused with Ilithyia and with Hecate; but

it is unnecessary to pursue the inquiry into these details.*

Like most of the Olympians, Artemis was connected not only with

beast-worship, but with plant-worship. She was known by the names

Daphnaea and Cedreatis; at Ephesus not only the olive but the oak was

sacred to her; at Delos she had her palm tree. Her idol was placed in or

hung from the branches of these trees, and it is not improbable that she

succeeded to the honours either of a tree worshipped in itself and for

itself, or of the spirit or genius which was presumed to dwell in and

inform it. Similar examples of one creed inheriting the holy things

of its predecessor are common enough where either missionaries, as in

Mexico and China, or the early preachers of the gospel in Brittany or

Scandinavia, appropriated to Christ the holy days of pagan deities and

consecrated fetish stones with the mark of the cross. Unluckily, we

have no historical evidence as to the moment in which the ancient tribal

totems and fetishes and sacrifices were placed under the protection of

the various Olympians, in whose cult they survive, like flies in amber.

But that this process did take place is the most obvious explanation

of the rude factors in the religion of Artemis, as of Apollo, Zeus or

Dionysus.

* Cf. Preller, i. 256, 257. Bacchylides make Hecate the

daughter of "deep-bosomed Night". (40). The Scholiast on the

second idyll of Theocritus, in which the sorceress appeals

to the magic of the moon, makes her a daughter of Zeus and

Demeter, and identified with Artemis. Here, more clearly

than elsewhere, the Artemis appears _sub luce maligna_,

under the wan uncertain light of the moon.

It was ever the tendency of Greek thought to turn from the contemplation

of dark and inscrutable things in the character of the gods and to endow

them with the fairest attributes. The primitive formless _Zoana_ give

place to the ideal statues of gold and ivory. The Artemis to whom a

fawn in a maiden's dress is sacrificed does not haunt the memory of

Euripides; his Artemis is fair and honourable, pure and maidenly, a

goddess wandering in lonely places unbeholden of man. It is thus, if one

may rhyme the speech of Hippolytus, that her votary addresses her:--

For thee soft crowns in thine untrampled mead

I weave, my lady, and to thee I bear;

Thither no shepherd drives his flocks to feed,

Nor scythe of steel has ever laboured there;

Nay, through the spring among the blossoms fair

The brown bee comes and goes, and with good heed

Thy maiden, Reverence, sweet streams doth lead

About the grassy close that is her care!

Souls only that are gracious and serene

By gift of God, in human lore unread,

May pluck these holy blooms and grasses green

That now I wreathe for thine immortal head,

I who may walk with thee, thyself unseen,

And by thy whispered voice am comforted.